Bluetooth And The Art Of Sex

Is Bluetooth helping Brits meet each other and have sex?

Apparently, according to WIRED, which reports on a new craze called ‘toothing’ (couldn’t they have come up with something sexier?). Toothing involves using the Bluetooth feature in a cellphone — used to transfer data between one Bluetooth device and another, without wires — to send messages to another cellphone within range (across a room, say.)

What the toothers do, apparently, is to spot someone else messing with their cellphone on a train, a mall or, somewhat unromantically, in a carpark, and then send them a message using this feature (via a trick called Bluejacking, or its more criminal cousin, Bluesnarfing). They then converse via SMS, or text, hook up and have sex. It sounds a bit like the letters pages in Penthouse.

There’s even a website dedicated to toothing (intriguingly, the Google context-aware ads that appear at the top of the site seem as confused as I: They are all about teeth whitening).

Now I have to express a bit of scepticism about this, it being so close to April 1 and all that. The story says that “when a Bluetooth phone locates another, it can see the name that the device’s owner has given it. And most, though not all, toothers use names that in one way or another betray their gender.” Is that true? In my experiments with Bluejacking, if you try to ‘discover’ other devices, the only results you will get are likely to be the name of the device (Nokio 7650, or whatever). But maybe that’s not the case everywhere.

Still, there’s no denying that Bluetooth has brought a bit of romance into people’s lives. A service called Serendipity will sniff out other phones and, if their owners are using the service, look to see whether the two people are compatible based on its database, according to the Daily Telegraph.